FPS/Sega Saturn 2 - Half-life - The Headcrab that could have Been

Happy Halloween, Saturnheads! Here's the final article in our 2023 Saturn SPEWWWWWWWWWmewmewmewmew! For our main feature, here is a legend among legendary games! If you were wanting another healthy helping of the Month of SPEWWWW--cough cough okay gotta stop now, then look no further! This is a precursor to a new segment and feature on the Junkyard and it's a great way to recgnize a great game that could have joined a great system.

 Many gamers, even many Half-life fans are not aware that Half-life was supposed to make an appearance on the Sega Dreamcast. Why these two legendary entities never met is between life and the fates, but one can only wonder what could have been. The port was marred with delays and the Dreamcast wasn't doing well in the market, but apparently the whole thing was cancelled despite the fact that it was ready to ship. Yes, Half-life made an appearance on the PS2, but the Dreamcast copy would have been a marrying of the centuries. Half-life is a milestone in gaming history and it needs to be celebrated to its utmost. 

The worst part about this is that such a sight would have been something of a novelty, both the true coverart and the fact that it was supposed to be the exclusive release of the expansion pack, Blue Shift. Now, do I care that it was not exclusive to the Dreamcast? No, and I am also not the biggest fan of the Blue Shift expansion anyway. Either way, I am a huge fan of Half-life and I played it for hours and finally beat it after almost a month. 

This was mostly because I had a hell of a time figuring out some of it and some of it was really hard for my poor 12 year old brain. However, it was magnificent! It scared the pants off of me with the head crabs and the huge enormous water creatures that charged you when you went under. There are miles and miles of story and gameplay in this and it is really hard to determine where to start. 

The graphics, for the time, were phenomenal. They weren't so great when it came to the Blueshift upgrade, but often times I find myself switching the graphics very quickly back to the original. That's what feels natural. That's when you start the whole game on the trolley ride that so many people have either dreaded or found absolutely iconic. Count me in the latter. It was worth seeing all of the new graphics, the upgraded Quake engine that made the 3D environments look so premitive and crude by today's standards but these were graphics that defined an age. 

Storywise, this is about as raw and natural as it gets. You are told where to go and what to do, but that's because you're going to work and you're late. The scientists need to get to the experiment and it needs to start on schedule. You have to get your equipment and you need to get to the lab, pronto! Of course, everything goes wrong, and you need to get through obstacles to survive a dying underground facility. Dying in both it's falling apart and its being invaded by monsters and they're killing the scientists. Then the military comes in. Then there are ninja spies. Look, it gets a little crazy, and there's a ton of stuff to go over. 

The aliens are horrifying, if that was not made clear earlier. Headcrabs will attack you out of nowhere. The whole "if it were a snake, it'd have bitten me", these things are the prime example of jumping out and attacking you! They latch onto deadbodies and act as their heads as they zombify them, which only adds to their terrorizing characteristics! These things are vile! 

All of the encounters with the inhabitants of Xen are not exactly pleasant, mind you. Some of them can get as tall as oak trees and that is no joke. We don't even know how long those green blind worm things truly are. We just know that if we make too much noise and are too slow, they will kill us in about three swipes or less. There are all kinds of obstacles to go around already and you have to contend with aliens that teleport into the room and shoot lightning at you. This occurs on a stiflingly regular basis. 

Working your way through Black Mesa and fighting off increasingly more difficult challenges has never felt more satisfying. There is a linear path, but it feels like you're being pulled toward it and you have to keep your guns blazing if you want to stay alive. 

The weapons, by the way, are amazing. From the lowliest crowbar that comes when you need it most, to the explosive laser zapper that makes your enemies into giblets, these are awesome. My personal favorites of the arsenal are the Colt Python .357 Magnum sixshooter and the Black Mesa Crossbow. Believe me, in some of those stealth sections, you will fall in love with the crossbow. Do not underestimate it as it is often a one-hit kill to normal enemies.

Some of these sections can be a little hard to figure out as some of the jump and crouch mechanics can be a little cryptic. Jump-crouching is a must for some sections and you'll need to know which ones to continue. Some of the jump sections over high cliffs can come with either a helicopter or several enemies firing at you. This sort of thing can happen. There are also sniper sections, which no one usually likes. That section is best treated with the Rocket-Propelled Grenade Launcher. 

This game remains a legend to this day and it is lauded as one of the greatest of its kind still. Even after Half-life 2 came out, this was very hard to outshine. However, it did come with some very long puzzle sections and there are some platforming sections that should never have made it to an FPS. Xen, as many will attest, is one of the longest, most boring sections and that is no joke. There are times the challenges can become very, very frustrating and it is in those moments when you need to reach deep down and try not to cheat. Or, to make yourself feel better, make an extra save file for cheating. That's fun too. 

Blue Shift was far outshined by its only other expansion pack, Opposing Force. That expansion was far longer, better planned out and had a much more solid challenge to it. Blue Shift was a blink-and-you-miss it kind of game. This was because it only lasted maybe two hours and the contents within are quite forgettable. There's really no way around one single fact: You can play both of them and all of Half-life and you will get a good solid 20+ hours of gameplay. One short expansion certainly didn't spoil the experience.  

This game is still very available on several platforms, along with its sequel and a VR game that released as well. Sadly, it was never concluded with a true third installment, but here's hoping that changes soon enough. Until then, there's so many hours of great games that came from Half-life, on top of the first game itself. If you haven't tried any of these titles, do not hesitate to do so if you want an awesome FPS experience either with friends or in a single-player. What's stopping you? It's not like games today are getting any better. VIRTUA BURN!!!!

Happy Halloween from all of us at the Saturn Junkyard!

Neptune - The Horror Genre - Survival Checklist of Death (Pt 3)

 Happy Halloween, Saturnheads!!!!! We're almost to the finish line, so here's  the finish of this particular feature on Horror in gaming. I hope you're ready for the season to come to a head, because The Saturn SPEWWWWWWWWWWWWWKINESS is gonna keep on keeping on!

The tropes we know and love/hate from the horror we love/hate have been used and abused to great and terrible effect. What you do and what you don't do can be very situational and very fickle. A lot of things work off of something else. 

Weapons

If you have a gun, being able to shoot every single enemy once CAN make the game boring. How do you fix this? Left 4 Dead made their one-hit zombies extremely plentiful and added very tough zombies sprinkled in among them. That brings about satisfying gameplay as you mow down the small-fries while also filling a Tank Zombie full of bullets to bring it down like a mammoth. It's satisfaction and it's of the good kind. 

Giving the shotgun a good, heavy sound and damage output will make your player happy. The melee chopping and hitting hard with good reaction will make them okay with low ammunition. Making your main character Doom Guy and equipping him to the teeth will require many demons of different types and stages keeping you guessing and looking for secrets. Interesting gameplay and scary strong monsters make awesome guns okay. 

Setting up the Scares

What made PT so amazing was the scare factors and the visuals. You literally have no defenses against these things. If you do one thing wrong at the wrong time, something will kill you and you may get lost and need to backtrack. All of this evokes fear, along with the setting, which grew steadily darker the more you went. Setting off with jump scares from the start is annoying. Waiting it out, keeping the setting dark, foreboding and unsettling, then unleashing the jump scares and other scares will keep your customers happy. 

Throwing a monster and/or body horror guy straight from the first scene is robbing your audience. You are trying to jingle keys in front of their face and it is insulting. This can't be done at the very start, in broad daylight, it simply kills it from the very start. If you start at 10 and keep it at 10, how am I supposed to feel unsettled? Agony had nothing but blood and guts and spurting red stuff everywhere from start to finish. Just because we don't live in that in real life does not mean it is interesting!

Breaking the Tension

Comedy and romance can work in a horror story. In fact, it is good to keep a bit of every genre in your story. The problem is, you need to stick to it and not derail the main draw, which is horror! If you cut the tension with a joke or some sudden girl wanting to be kissed, it kills the suspense completely! Having the horrible creature jump out and juggle eyeballs, without proper context and character concept, is jarring and assassinates any chance of being scared of your horrible creature.

By the same concept, seeing your horrible creature in full view while also cutting and stabbing with gore had better also have some good build up. If we see the creature kill a bunch of people, little by little, come out of the shadows and stare your character down while also attempting to kill them, builds fear of the creature. Nemesis did this to tremendous effect in Resident Evil 3 while Alien: Colonial Marine glitches the Alien Queen while also killing the gameplay by not having the proper gameplay to begin with? What? Build up your villains, get me scared! Stick to your mechanics! It's not a hard concept.

Resources

How much do you starve your player of health, ammunition and other items? What is too much or too little? Some games will get it so right that you will naturally conserve your resources while keeping a steady flow of death. Other games, if you shoot one bullet out of line, you have already used too much and you need to backtrack to get the bullet back into your gun. Deep Fear took this concept and said, "no, I'll just put a place where you can replenish health and ammunition infinitely", this broke the tension as a whole. 

This concept needs to work throughout the entire game the same way each time, or it will not work. This is a very delicate game mechanic, but it can be so beautifully pulled off as to make your game one where the player will return time and time again. 

The Ending

Yes, your game needs an END. It does not need to keep going for decades upon decades upon however long as a series/loosely strung together bunch of games. D took a good way about this, in that each game was a separate concept. The problem there is that some of the games could have benefitted from taking more of the first game's idea. When games have endings, with stories today, you can bet they're either going to retcon the last ending to continue the series or just ignore the lore and continue regardless. Neither of these are a good idea, but happens so wearily often! 

The story is one of the hardest parts to get right. Resident Evil 7 did this concept a lot of justice all the way up until it gave you a choice between saving two ladies. One breaks the story entirely, the other only breaks the story a little bit. The choice should have never been in the game, as the story was already a little convoluted, but that's just how it goes. 

This is also a good place to draw this Saturn SPEWWWWKIES!!!! 2023 feature to a close. It is a lot of fun to explore but it is vast and there is so much to talk about. Halloween is fun to celebrate and fighting off horrific creatures is a fantastic way to spend the holiday. Invite over some friends and play some local multiplayer or LANs. Share some scares this season and remember to jump out when they least expect it! VirtuaAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

The House of the Dead Remake - Digital Zombie Fluff

Next in the Saturn month of Saturn SPEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWKIESATURN! This time we have something new and horribly gory! Please enjoy!

Over the years of posting reviews on this site, there has been one title that has gotten a constant mention throughout. This was not on purpose, but on a small glance at my past articles for the Junkyard, it has shown up on multiple top 10 lists and gotten held up as one of the examples of railshooters done correctly. It has been compared to many of its genre and come out looking very favorable, at least in this subjective reviewer's opinion. This subjective reviewer's opinion also seems to gravitate toward keeping the graphics blocky, sketchy and blurry as they were upon their implimentation to the Saturn or Arcade cabinets. 

Guess what, sports fans, this is a very good example of just that. The House of the Dead was remade for modern consoles in April of 2022 and you can count it among the remakes that did its best. It is by no means a terrible remake, nor does it look "bad". The graphics actually look quite detailed, but there is something wrong with them. The movements of the zombies and something about the movements of the screen seem so unattached. It's like they tried to keep the blocky, slow movements of the original port while implimenting them with new, polished graphics and the mixture is like a 1970's movie played on Bluray. It looks off. 

That's pretty much all there is to say about what is really wrong with this port. It seems so out of place. Like they told every single original actor of a movie to wear a full body suit of themselves, with new cameras and equipment. It doesn't wholly affect the gameplay, though. You can shoot zombies and have fun, and there are some nice darker tones to the game. 

There are good things here. I found myself really enjoying shooting things in the background and either finding a secret or just destroying something randomly. They did a very good job detailing the game with breakable stuff. That enhances the game and gives you a good sense of satisfaction. They also added a few more little items that improve the difficulty. Like, with the first villain, the Hangedman. He's also known as "That annoying bat dude that flies around and maybe sics a giant headless armor suit on you". A long title, I know. Instead of just shooting him in this version, though, he has a weakspot on his chest. Since he's slightly larger and more detailed, this actually worked. 

There were little tidbits here and there that made this game more fun. I loved how they made the blade jumper guys much darker and blend in more with the shadows. It made me feel observant when I spotted them and attacked them very early. There's good, grotesque violence to be had here and the game is far more accessible than it was. 

Is this game worth buying now? Yes, very much so. It is not a bad port at all, it simply has its off points and, as always, I am of a mind that the original is just a more fulfilling experience. That being said, the ambience, the higher graphics and the gameplay all have their ups and downs, but overall, it comes out ahead. What would have made this game far more edible is if, like in Nights Into Dreams Remake, they included the original game in its entirety. They didn't do that, but they did add a whole bunch of extra game features. 

The problem I had with these extra features was that Horde Mode could not be played without erasing your save game. That was a very strange decision on their part because it meant I had to beat the entire game to actually test it out. If that were the case, they may as well have made it an unlockable feature. Either way, it's your standard basic affair of minigames and none of them are especially noteworthy. They're not great, but good for a distraction. 

It's easier, obviously, because it doesn't have limited continues. That is actually a good thing, because the finite deaths did limit the original game in many ways. This is especially true whenever they were not getting paid for their labors in our hard earned quarters. Either way, this game is worth getting, playing and enjoying but it is not exactly worth celebrating. If this is your only way to play this game, you could do far worse. It is a game they built from the ground up. Though I question the use of Unity, I will not get into that. Just know that it is a new game from the Saturn and we should be grateful that we're still getting some classics to this day from our old friend of yesterday. Kill zombies, but play nice and drink water.

Neptune - The Horror Genre - Try Not to Die (Pt 2)

The Horror Genre Article continues in the Saturn Month of Horror SPEEWWWKAAAAA!!! Now we're talking about the games that got it wrong and a deeper look at what makes and breaks the concept! Try to keep your brains! 

As amazing a concept as it can be, there can be plenty that can go wrong with Survival Horror at its very core. There are games that get their weapons and the feeling of shooting completely wrong. Sometimes, the targetting system can be awkward on purpose to enhance the scare effect of helplessness. Some games take this to mean they can make the targetting system as rubbish as possible and that will work. No, do not do that.

Where Alien Isolation got this concept to a near perfect, if somewhat languid experience, Agony took the concept of running and hiding and shat it right out. You need to be able to hide. Agony glitches so badly, hiding is utterly useless more often than not. When you are running and hiding from the farmer guy, Jack Baker in RE7, you feel the horror! If you have a knife against his shovel, you feel raw terror when you see him bust through a wall saying "There you are!" That sort of real feeling of helplessness is what you need and it goes so far when you can do nothing but run and hide. If you can't even run and hide, however, what can you do? Die! That's what! Then you'll probably turn off the game!

Running and hiding was a concept that put Five Nights at Freddy's on the map. While it dropped the ball on the concept of jump scares that aren't annoying as all hell, it still garnered a following from sheer gameplay and building challenge. That, plus the lore and the characters. 

There we come to a core that can also make or break a game. The story and the characters can bring your game from good to LEGENDARY and that is no exaggeration. FNAF has a great lore when it's not walking all over itself and forgetting whole chapters. Cut out your own square of Silent Hill's story, if you'd like, because it also gets choppy after the first few games, but what is there is very well crafted with subjects of psyche and the subconscious. 

Even if the story and the characters only work in one game, that can catapult that game into the stars. Doom had the most minimal story and character, but somehow brought Doomguy to the mainstream in a way that cements him there still today. Dead Space, the first and only the first game, has a pretty decent story to pull you along the haunted space corridors to fight space monsters with a space spinal suit. It and Half-life brought about an amazing use of the silent hero because he is you and you are looking for a way out and a way to survive. 

Then there are plenty of games that dropped the ball on Resident Evil. Yes, Resident Evil was a genre all its own, basically, because no one remembers Resident Evil Survivor everyone needed tank controls, slow moving enemies, scarce resources and stupid dialogue. They took all of these elements of the game and spilled them over the pavement. This, plus the fact that there were SO MANY of them! Just look at my Worst Games of the Sega Saturn 2 you will see plenty of them. Not all of them are the worst examples, but there are some very horrible ones (not in a good way). Then there's Countdown: Vampires, Deep Fear, and I could go on for days listing them. Trust me. There are a lot. 

There are so many concepts that go into Horror in gaming, as stated before. I've scratched the surface of games that do this well and not well, but these gameplay mechanics and visual style cannot be overstated. So, let's keep this going and keep these articles from being novels! Virtua SPEEEWWWWW!!!!  

Neptune - The Horror Genre - Survive or SurDie!

 Oh, look, Virtua Neptune worked in yet another opinion piece for the Month of Saturn SPEEEWWWWKIEKINS!!! Yeah, well, let's keep shaking it up and and throwing out the scares!

Survival Horror, Zombie Shooters, and Horror in general can make for some of the greatest and the stupidest games ever made! Hyperbole abound! People will spend their paychecks when they see that you're killing zombies, vampires, werewolves, monsters and sludge creatures. It could be a cardboard monster on a stick. If it's well placed, jumps out when we don't expect it and keeps us on our toes, it can work for this genre. 

The fact that video games are an interactive medium makes it very, very unique, if you have not noticed. Doing anything more customizable requires schooling and skillcrafting. Video games require practice and that practice is quite often the most fun in one person's life. Teaching your brain to play the game and dealing with the horrors for the first time gives you the horror experience as if you are there and you are facing down Jason Vorhees yourself, then you can BE Jason Voorhees. 

Well that's great! All of the blood and the guts that we want and we can make that happen! Games such as Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, House of the Dead 1 & 2, The Dead Rising Series, CarnEvil and any number of other games have captured us with the concept of mowing down zombies in ridiculous numbers and working with friends and family to do so. These simple shoot'em ups and run and gun games were not "easy" to make, but they were not rocket science in terms of getting the formula. A good, chunky sound effect, a good recoil of your weapon, repercussion of the zombie's reaction and splatter of blood all accumulated into an experience that is real and fake enough to trick your brain into thinking you just blasted something full force with metal shreds. 

The same thing is true for melee weapons on zombies. Half-life captured this concept with the crowbar and Left 4 Dead did it very well with the axe. Then there are the chainsaws from Doom and Gears of War. You need the blood and you need the recoil from the hit. It needs to feel like I have hit someone really hard with the intent to kill. 

Fairly simple if you work at it. In no way is game development labeled as "easy". This is especially true for another very well known of the horror gaming genre, Survival Horror. After Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil, this genre exploded with popularity and there is a very good reason for that. This is dynamic, this is also something that can be open to the most creativity and imagination as anyone can put into it. 

PT, Playable Teaser, AKA the failed Silent Hill game that never was, is a well known legend among gamers. Very few people have it on their Playstation 4 and it is well known as one of the greatest demos of all time. The gameplay, while slightly repetitive, draws you deeper into a world of darkness and dread that will keep you in the throes of horror with very little hope of climbing back out. This is mostly because the game was cancelled and this game art of a demo is nothing but a demo. There have been rumors that it will be unearthed some day, but those are just rumors until we see some digital gold and physical nirvana. 

Then came a glimmer of hope that was also quite thoroughly stamped out VERY soon after it was announced. Allison Road was going to pick up where PT left off and the gameplay it boasted was quite similar, along with its horror style and realistic graphics. The public took another hit, but after that, we grew accustomed to disappointment. 

The concept was finally picked up and brought to life by Capcom by none other than the Resident Evil Franchise. For the first time, the RE series got a mainstream first-person survival horror game in the form of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. It had the ambience, it had the scares, the gameplay was fun and somewhat challenging and it took the concept to the level we were waiting for. Was everyone happy with it? Obviously not, but it was still a breath of fresh air after some very loud blasts of methane. Though, it doesn't technically take advantage of the zombie concept, it does what it does well with scares and excitement. It had a rather weak third act, but there was plenty of game to love and it brought both the survival and the horror to the table. 

The greatness of this concept is vast and dire, so let's go ahead and say we're going for a Part 2 coming next week for the Month of Saturn SPEEEEEEWWWW all over your dad's shoes!

Casper - The Friendly Lump

Welcome back, Saturn fans, to The Saturn Month of Saturn SPEEEEEWWWWW!!!! Get ready for the worst scare of all! The horrors of the movie tie-in games! Nuu! 

The Sega Saturn was in its hayday during a strange period in gaming history. It was a very experimental period where large corporations and movie studios were a lot less tentative. While movie tie-ins were not new by any means, Casper came out when these games were released on every single port they could get their hands on. Anytime you looked at a game ad in a magazine or a comic book, you would see several different cartridges and/or CD's with the various coverarts for every system. Casper was released on the SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Playstation, Sega Saturn, 3DO (strangely, the final game for the system) and PC! This was the norm for back in those days, but this was around the time when they stopped doing that and started releasing them on just two or three instead. With the 3D era coming in full force, games were becoming much harder and more costly to make. 

Casper didn't seem to have the problem of having an expensive development, though. While it does boast a semi-unique isometric puzzler gameplay, it is still very much considered a 2D game. The graphics do what they set out to do, the graphical art is quite nice and the ambience of the level works, that's about the most credit you can give the whole game. 

Beyond that, this game is a lot of fluff with a whole lot of no content. You fly around the levels looking for puzzle pieces, keys to get to said puzzle pieces and find secrets. While resistance to get these puzzle pieces is rather scant, there are places in the game where you need to contend with the uncles. 

The level with Uncle Fatso, if I may be frank, startled the life out of me, pun intended. After going through rooms of nothing but stillness and finding pieces of a painting, Fatso came out of nowhere and began chasing me. This level became some of the most fun in the game and was something of an iconic moment, because after that, it was more bland, lifeless level. The puzzle pieces take a while to find if you don't know where to go or what key opens which door. This is one of those games where they had to make it cryptic and slow-going to elongate it and make it "worth your while".

If you've read my Top 20 Worst Games of the Saturn list, you'll know that I have placed this game in a rather dishonorable spot. There's really no other way to put it. This game is a slog to get through and playing it over a long period of time can very quickly become the cure for sleep deprivation. Aside from a few places where you need to deal with the uncles, there's very little to get excited about. Even the uncles aren't anything. Aside from Fatso, the others are just slow death traps that follow you around. 

You've got the mansion and you've got the hedge maze in the backyard. Those are the two primary locations in this game and the levels are dizzying. Keeping up with where you've been and what samey room you've been in to get what puzzle piece is enough to make you go crosseyed if this is not your prefered genre. If you're looking for a scary puzzler with lot's of intrigue take this out of your Saturn immediately and put in D. This game is bland, tasteless and reaks of bad punny one-liners and vague ties to a movie that may be nice to watch on Halloween once in a while. This game should be tested before selecting as a common haunt. Virtua Ghost Flies!

Area 51 - Why do Bones Fly?

Welcome, one and all, to the 2023 month of Saturn SPEWWWWWWWWWKIES! We're doing what we did last year, only it's this year! Just sit back, put on some background horrors and let's start this Halloween with a bang! No, really, there's a lot of guns going bang bang.  

Anyone who remembers the arcade in the mid 90's will remember this game very, very well. Area 51 was one of the more prolific arcade cabinets of the era and here we are with a Sega Saturn port. Not only was there a Sega Saturn port, but there was also a Playstation port! It comes as no real surprise to know that they were both quite dreadful, quite dreadful, indeed. 

Can you enjoy the game as it is on the Saturn? Yes, it isn't so much that the game was ruined, it's more that the game got really, really choppy. The graininess of the FMV's are to be expected, they were still a new feature of the genre. We've already gone into how FMV's were a very bad idea, and this game is no different at all. The people in the costumes look awful, their acting is terrible, they don't look like Special Forces of any kind. They look like cosplayers doing a very bad job. And yes, this falls into the "So bad, it's good territory" for many, because it very much is! Their cheesy acting and ridiculously absurd movements give off great entertainment for all to see. 

The game, is in all fairness, very middling. The game was fun for what it was. It was a railshooter and you shot things to make them die. It did its job and there are some very nice powerups to make things explode with more frequency. That's all well and good, but it's just not that great if we look at the forest for the trees. The angles you view the game from are so flat and the game seems pretty lifeless. There's simply no satisfaction outside of shooting zombies and making them fly into bones. 

You get so much more with the experiences of Virtua Cop or House of the Dead than you do with this. The technology tries, but when you look at it objectively, the graphics, the repercussion from the shooting, the stupid looking zombies, all of it just doesn't culminate in anything more than a nostalgic look back at your days with the cabinets. Area 51 is not a bad game on Saturn or Playstation, they just simply lack from the arcade, which was already lacking to begin with. 

When you want to shoot zombies, this is a far cry better than a lot of the games that are out there. This beats Alone in the Dark 2 by a mile and you can pop this in for some nice light gun action anytime you want because all of the guns for the Saturn work for this game! It's a good game to have in the collection, especially if this is your genre. It's a fine title, even if it's not all that scary. Still! We've got our first strike for the Saturn Month of Spookiness! Just don't worry, these posts are not haunted! Virtua Boo!